The Road Ahead: 11/09/2018 [MEGA]

You’ve been asking “Where is the Road Ahead?” and here it is! We are very excited to share the roadmap for the next couple of months. So, without further ado…

NEW FEATURE: The Grand Arena

The big feature announcement to round out the year: the Grand Arena!

Currently, you can be the best player in your server and dominate the PVP ARENA. Or, you can be part of the best guild and defeat other guilds in Territory Wars. However, when we look forward at what we’d like this game to be in the future, a big part of our vision is to answer questions like, “Who is the greatest player in all of Star WarsTM: Galaxy of Heroes? Who is the greatest player in all of the galaxy?”

While we’re still a few steps away from that future, we are excited to announce the first step toward that vision, which begins with the opportunity to play PVP across servers.

Here’s a little about what you can expect in the Grand Arena:

At the beginning of the Grand Arena Event, you’ll be matched with 7 other players from across the game who have a Galactic Power score very similar to your own. In the first round, you’ll be matched up against a random player from your group to essentially fight a mini-Territory War. You’ll then set up defenses to defend your own territories, as well as attack your opponent's territories in an attempt to overcome their defenses. You’ll earn banners for successfully attacking and defeating an opponent’s territory, as well as defending your own territory. At the end of the battle, whoever has earned the most banners will be the winner.

Each round, you’ll be matched with other players who have the same win/loss record as you, and you’ll never fight the same opponent twice in a Grand Arena event. You’ll earn special rewards after each offensive battle you complete, at the end of each of the 3 rounds, and a final set of rewards at the end of the event based on your standing in the 8-player group.

We hope you’re excited to have the opportunity to show your expertise in the Grand Arena and look forward to sharing more details and the release schedule in the coming weeks. For your convenience, we’ll track all communication about the Grand Arena here: GRAND ARENA MEGATHREAD

NEW FEATURE: Player-controlled Payout/Time Zones Changes

The single most common quality of life request we’ve heard in recent months is to allow player-controlled payout/time zone changes.

Like the server sharding system, this was a feature that worked for a time, but we recognize you live all over the world, lead complicated lives, and that the forced ‘6PM in the time zone you originally logged in on’ has been a great inconvenience for many of you.

To help with this, we have introduced the ability to change payouts up to two times a year. The ability will be otherwise unbounded, so watch out all of you in Alaska and Greenland, there are probably hordes of people coming for your time zone.

In conjunction with shardless 1:1 PVP, this begins to give you all opportunities to explore competition outside of your shards, and we are excited about that.

NEW CONTENT: KOTOR Companions

With the release of Jedi Knight Revan, we brought one of the most often requested characters into Star Wars: Galaxy of Heroes. The excitement in the community has been palpable for weeks, and watching many of you join forces to solve the reveal cypher was a truly special moment for the game team to watch.

We’re excited to continue the celebration of the 15th Anniversary of Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic with additional companions in the coming weeks. Keep an eye out for an upcoming announcement about which Old Republic era characters are coming to the holotable next!

NEW CONTENT: Original Trilogy

To round out the year, we’re going to continue our exploration of the Original Trilogy universe. While we’ve dipped into this era previously, there are still so many iconic characters and ships that we want to bring to the game from this time period. You can definitely count on some teases and puzzles from Crumb in the coming months. Stay tuned!

3rd Anniversary of SWGOH
And last, but certainly not least, a special note from CG_Carrie: “Three years ago, we started on an amazing journey that, thanks to you, continues to this day. We are so incredibly grateful to all of you for continuing to be members of the Star Wars: Galaxy of Heroes community.

We’ve always thought of you guys like a Massively-Multiplayer Online community and want to honor the investment you’ve continued to make in our game and team. We have some gifts and events planned for everyone to celebrate with us. We will share more details closer to the start of the event.

I look forward to the next three years as the stories we have to tell continue to unfold, but more importantly, please know that the things you all do with the game continue to astound and impress us.”

We hope you’ve enjoyed this peek into the future of Star Wars: Galaxy of Heroes and wish you the best of luck on the holotables.

The obvious question that everyone will want to know - when you talk about the timing of these things, do we expect this to bleed into the next quarter? To me it sounds like "The next few weeks" and "the next few months" leads itself to not even being out during the time period these road aheads are covering.

Thats a pretty useless road ahead. Basically you add a useless, worthless feature in cross server pvp, you add individual payout times which will increase shard chat dominance in the top of arena, and announce a lot of marquee characters.

So are we now on a new 3 month window to get the next road ahead, is it still coming at the beginning of January, or is everything just going to be a free for all for now on? With this particular road ahead being super late based on past comments from Carrie, now would be a good time to again lay out when we should expect to see these road ahead moving forward.